There’s a classic personality question related to this. Don’t try and over think it. Go with your first reaction. If you had to choose between the two, would you rather have the power of flight or the power of invisibility?

invisibility. i’m the guy who played way too much Deus Ex some time ago and now my natural reaction to anything is to sneak around lest I be shot to super death by a squad of troopers and their pet giant robot.

Both. The I’d be like an invisible bird, I’d go flying into peoples’ windows, auddenly BAM and they’d go what was that and they’d go look for a bird that flew into the window, and what, no bird. Imagine their faces.

Power of flight, easy. I love flying, I love it, and I can’t be a fighter pilot (nor any other military pilot for that matter) so this is the next best thing (besides a non-military license I suppose xD)

Flight for me. I’m not much of a “do evil unto others and get away with it” kind of person. Besides, flight would be useful even when you run out of enemies. And, it would be so cool. And I hate driving. I’d rather fly.

I’d love flight. <3 That’s one of those things I can always do for a little while in my dreams. It has a tendency to fizz out on me, though. But man, taking hover-steps is awesome, because when people finally notice that I’m an inch off the ground when I take a step, they’re like WTF? x3

It also means that my feet don’t have to hurt, because I can just kinda hover whenever I want to. :3

Flight for me! I always thought it would be awesome to be standing outside on a beautiful day with a gentle breeze and clear skies and just take off soaring. It would also eventually get rid of my fear of heights. ^^

Also, my art teacher in high school asked us that question a couple years ago. He was dead set that if you were invisible, things you wore and ate wouldn’t turn invisible. So if you ate an apple and then went to rob a bank, everyone would go “Ahhh, it’s the notorious floating half-digested apple burglar!”

Good point indeed, Chris. And the comic’s humor is excellent in its simplicity.

Both powers represent a way to escape, no?

I’d take flight, definitely. Assuming I can take to really fast speeds (faster than anything man-made…able to maneuver deftly at such speeds…as in, the proper reflexes for my brain to handle it).
Faster, easier, cheaper transportation. Getting to places no one’s been to. Escaping any and all threats as long as you’re not totally cornered.
I could also help people a lot more. Be my own personal rescue squad.

For that, it’d be really hepful if I can add things/people I’m touching to my “levitation field.” That is, not need simple muscle power (and find myself encumbered) by trying to drag 1+ people or a ton of goods.
I’m assuming the power is self-sustaining…nothing like jet propulsion or the like…

Invisibility, even if things like UV and infrared vision don’t ruin it, is still pretty limited. A lot of high-security places have motion, pressure detectors…and you still need doors and windows to get through… Plus you’re not perfectly silent, and I’m guessing you’d leave trails and evidence (footprints, fingerprints) like anyone else.

Remember too…flight can get you to a lot of places, just like invisibility. Most people won’t care to check the ceiling, especially if you’re camouflaged. You can just levitate against the roof.

On that…the one good use to invisibility, would be in becoming the ultimate fly on the wall. You could get to hear and see what the powers that be are doing in their palaces and offices. You could tag criminals and thus get to find evidence that the authorities would never discover. With enough wits and planning, you could bring down hundreds, thousands of criminal, corrupt people.

I guess it all boils down to the specifics. I’m assuming the power somehow feeds off your own energy, and is sustainable over long periods, with minimal effort. As in, you can keep it up even while sleeping. It’d be the best way to hide…to be invisible (or floating miles above a solitary spot in the middle of the ocean…away from any plane routes, please)…while sleeping.

The best power of all, probably…would be to control either space in its entirety…or motion itself. You could move things, yourself included. Stop them. Create “nothing crosses this space” barriers for your protection or that of others…teleport (or go so fast it’s almost as if). With enough finesse, you could toy with light, and make yourself Predator-like invisible.

But that is just getting a bit too almighty for comfort. Power corrupts, and all that.

Ahh, but you’re assuming that it is true that the desired super power is associated with intorversion / extroversion. You can’t just say “it makes sense that introverts want to be invisible.” You have to perform an extensive double-blind test to see whether the two are correlated. And then you’re only certain of someone’s personality t the extent of the correlation (no psychological correlation is 100%.)

Secondly, I think you’re confusing “introvert” with “shy.” “Shy” means you are afraid of social interaction. “Introvert” means it’s just not a priority.
I’m tremendously introverted, but not at all shy. When forced to socialize, I’m perfectly comfortable and capable of it. But left to my own devices, I’ll just wander around and think deep thoughts about black holes and how to keep pink fuzzy bunnies from taking control of the world governments

Invisibility. Imagine all the bank jobs you could pull while invisible. You rob the bank and oh my lord all the cameras see is a floating gun and some floating clothes. Can’t exactly identify that now can ya? Also you could work as a hitman really easily. I’d be in with the mob making so much money. I’d have a personal f**king jet. Who needs flight bah hum bug.

Flight, no doubt.
I notice that some of the “introverted” guys dream of robbing a bank or hitting people, BTW. Invisibility would make them extroverted, and they’d end up wanting the power of flight 😀
Being able to fly would probably make me want to do it without being stared at, though. Uhmmm.

Oh, and I’m finally done reading all the archives. Yay!
Bravo Chris, Biff is awesome; often surprising, often inspiring, always able to make me smile (most of the time I’m actually laughing out loud). A shiny new bookmark for my webcomics folder.

I’ve thought about this before and Flight is somewhat practical, but invisibility is too much of a hassle.

First the power to fly, not be Superman. So flying at high speeds would shred your clothing or pull it off of you. Ever wonder why sky divers wear those special jump suits? Also flying at high altitudes, you would get pretty cold. If you took anything with you, your arms would get tired carrying it if it was a long distance, so you’d be limited to backpack of some sort. People would see you and this would cause a lot of problems for you. Not to mention you’d need to bring a GPS with you or shadow major highways (which would mean brining a map), just picking up and say flying from NY to LA wouldn’t be that easy, without a GPS you’d get lost, you’d be flying probably around 50mph maybe you could get away with 60mph (flying at super high speeds? your body wouldn’t be able to handle the force of the wind hitting you, you’d have to fly at a low speed, clothing, a helmet would get ripped off of your body at high speeds) so it would take you a very long time. Your neck would get tired of always looking up (assuming you are flying in a prone position, like super heroes do), and your shoulders would get tired of extending your arms, likewise your buttocks and lowerback would get sore always trying to keep your legs straight, you’d have to land frequently to rest. You’d probably end up having to fly in sort of a crawling or dog-paddling position, and that would look rather stupid.

Invisibility sounds cool, but if you commit a crime, you’d still leave fingerprints. But let’s say you wore gloves and took precautions, a lot of crimes are committed where there is no direct evidence, and these people still get caught most of the time. Weather you get away or not doesn’t have anything to do with special powers. Suddenly buying a boat or a house or trying to deposit $10k in your bank account would get you investigated by the IRS, if you couldn’t normally afford such a thing. But being able to sneak around, you’d constantly have to be moving out of people’s way, cars wouldn’t stop for you either. You would get cold because your clothing isn’t invisible so to take advantage of being invisible you’d have to be naked. Your bare feet would get sore from walking on pavement and you’d have to avoid surfaces that might injure your feet. You’d either have to hide clothing so you could turn visible and not draw attention to yourself, so you’d have to carefully plan out any trips you took.

Really both abilities have too many downsides, but flying is at least cool and it doesn’t require getting naked. There is a much cooler power that trumps the two, but it wasn’t an option which is a bummer. I guess I’d pick being able to fly and win some gold medals at the next Olympics for the high jump and pole vault.

flight. Ive drempt of flying, it was pretty cool.
I also hate driving.
landing w/o being noticed might be troublesome though… but maybe not, people tend not to look up.
@ the argument that power currupts: what fun is power if you’re not going to have fun with it?

I was asked that very question once by a therapist. It was among a barrage of other questions which gave me the choice between two powers. This was something like 15 years ago now.

As with anything relating to psychology, it is 100% accurate*.

*Unless the person has some other equally good explanation as to why they would give an answer that does not hinge on the original assumption that the question was based around.**

** Unless the explanation is actually the person’s way of subverting the question and giving a misleading answer that is based on their attempt to rationalize away the real reason they feel that way.***

If I could turn invisible robbers, gangsters, and Nazis would have a hard time killing me. If I could fly, Dick Cheney would be the only one with a hard time shooting me. I’ll have to go with invisibility.

Invisibility sounds like you wanna hide from the world, aka introvert/shy/what-have-you, apparently. But it’s also a means to satisfy a morbid curiosity…sounds more like a fitting thing for peeping toms and the like…unless it takes away too much of the thrill for them, I dunno 😛

And flight is the ultimate “I wanna run away” thing. That’s not an extrovert. That’s just an active introvert instead of a passive one.

It all depends on how you look at it, I guess…

Now, the only limit about flight, is in your speed and maneuverability (did I spell it right?)…and how careful you’re to keep your escape routes open.
If your power is something that operates on fundamental forces of the universe (such as limited psychokinesis, or some sort of interaction with gravity/electromagnetics/whatever), your maneuverability could easily become higher than that of anything man-made. You could outmaneuvers missiles, planes…anything they throw at you. Even if don’t beat them on the speed.

The difference between being corrupted, and having fun, is notoriously large. At least, that’s what I believe. I personally don’t like “having fun” and “doing evil/bad” being so closely associated. It’s a cultural confusion, more than a reality. I could have fun helping people, myself. And doing all other sorts of things that aren’t quite evil/bad.

So, to me, saying that not letting power corrupt you, is not having fun, is a misinterpretation.

On that…granted, invisibility is much more useful if you’re gonna work outside the law. Which is not necessarily doing evil/bad.

Again, I’d love to see an invisible guy/girl come out with a massive pile of undeniable evidence on those among the powers that be, that are always stealing, abusing and destroying their fellow people. So we can properly and rightfully put them all in jail.

@ Jude

We seem to converge on the same analysis, except you went further and made less assumptions. I just assumed the power of flight would bring in a load of related goodies, such as a severely heightened sense of orientation. Actually, it doesn’t take being super, to have that. People used to navigate long distances via planes and/or ships, often have an acute sense of location, despite constant reliance on maps and the like.

I also assumed your body would be adapted to the postures, and that you would be able to physically withstand the hardships of whatever flight speeds you can achieve…in the same way that most of us really cannot run faster than our bodies can handle. We can get exhausted, cramped or hurt, but that’s just a detail. It’s a big difference between “I pulled a muscle” and “my body couldn’t handle the speed so now I have bruises from the wind, my head is spinning, my bloodflow is a mess, and I ended up slamming against a tree ‘cos I got disoriented.”

In short, I sort of picked up the kind of flight power I’d want, with all prerequisite capabilities to make it safely and efficiently.

I’d probably also want something smoother than the actual physical impact of my body crossing the air at high speeds…sonic booms are quite destructive…anything man-sized will break fragile stuff (such as glass) and cause all manners of trouble when passing even relatively close to it, at speeds that could be supersonic or way worse.

Oh, and last but not last. Inertia. I’d like to forbid inertia from entering the picture. Slowing down from supersonic to an halt before making a hole/splatter in the asphalt is gonna be a b!tch, otherwise.

@ Chris: You surely anticipated that an open question to your readers would cause this apparent record in comments, no?

I got to read all your comics soon after I found your site through an ad @ PvP, about 4-5 months ago. But I only got to mind the comments later on. No wonder I missed that, since I’ve been reading them/participating for a much shorter while.

The connection between your strips, your comment, and the peoples’ replies, is achieved with smooth success in this layout.

I’m short. Flight is my choice, even if flight required effort. If it required more effort than walking somewhere, it would still be worth it just for getting things off of high shelves.
If you’re invisible, people will run into you. That’s why I’d never drive an invisible car.

Why do so many people associate flying with flight *from* something. In my dreams, flight is most always a means to excell for the sake of acceleration. And I rarely fly prone. It’s usually a long jump. The trick is in settling into the glide phase.

A few people have noted that clothing would be a dead giveaway to invisibility. Is there is an inherent paradox here? If getting naked would be required to achieve true invisibility, then this choice would surely appeal to an exhibitionist. Would [so called] science concede the possibility of a person who profiled as an introvert also self-proclaiming to be an exhibitionist?

@ MadDavid, 13:48: “fluffy pink bunnies?” Might I assume that you are not referring to the sort of hapless figureheads [stuffing for brains] like our CIC George “The Dubby” Junior, but rather the more sinister powers that never die?

I was in Nevada in the spring of ’92 where I saw a video of a very entertaining demonstration. A group had come to protest nuclear testing at the DOE building there. They brought about a dozen big marching bass drums (and bunny suits? I don’t remember if they wore bunny suits) with them and just walked around in circles, pounding the drums. They also had a banner that read: “They keep testing, and testing, and testing…”

@ Izui Shima, 19:40: I was going to say the fastest objects would be directed photons, (the lasers themselves don’t move) but then I remembered reading that they had actually demonstrated a workable device which instantaneously transported data across a very narrow gap. I don’t know if it was acual photons that were transported, or some sort of wave form. Or whatever. Regardless, don’t beam me up yet, Scotty. I’m not ready to return to my late sixties frame of mind.

Flight definitely! How cool would it be to be able to be all “Oh geez! Look at the time, I gotta go!” and b-line right to your destination without having to sit in traffic or pay for gas/oil/a vehicle to put gas or oil into. Plus I bet it would help you pick up a lot of chicks, especially if you wore a superman costume on a regular basis. Bonus points if you also wear a suit and glasses over the superman suit and tear off the suit whenever you had to fly anywhere, regardless of whether there’s anyone there to see it. 🙂

I’d choose invisibility if I knew why I was invisible and weather or not I could control it.

If I was invisible because my skin caused “rays” (any and all rays from the electomagnetic spectrum, not just the light rays from the visible spectrum) I may be “invisible” to both the naked eye, infared scanners, x-rays, ect…

I may also be partially immune to different kinds of radation. I could also walk though lasers without breaking them and possible take minimal damage from the ray/laser/phaser/emo guns of the future too.

That and I wouldn’t have to worry about somebody seeing me if I was taking a shower either.

It would probably still be fairly dificult to break the law when your invisible as you’d either need to be stark naked to take full advantage of it. Lulz…

Fliiiiiight
Something I’ve always wanted. I would chase the rain around the world and the sun would eternally be setting in my world. I’d sleep in the clouds and dance in the lightning, and I wouldn’t share it with anyone.

Flight. It was decided by my fellow sanctumites that I would fly. At supersonic speeds. Later of course I fleshed it out and was fused with a gaseous alien entity. Or I could run on the absence of light. Sometimes my thought processes frighten me.
Also, Almost through the backlog. Three days. Three days. Three days….

Invisibility to the max. I would be most interested in sneaking around and finding things out. However, I’d have to strip naked, and with my luck, I’d lose focus and become visible in the middle of a crowded room.

Hmm… I guess flight. I really,would not enjoy having to walk around naked. And then what if you needed to be visible? (Think invisible man… the man is invisible, but that doesn’t mean the clothes are too!!!)

On the one hand, being invisible could give me a chance to do whatever the hell I wanna do and freak people out with the floating objects.

On the other hand, being able to fly means I wouldn’t have to rely on my parents or the public transportation system and I could go anywhere I’ve been dying to visit, especially if the power of flight allows for flights faster than a jet.

Flight. Not much need/use for invisibility. Same for most people, introverts included. (Most, not all.)

@ Biligum
The test is wrong. Standardized clap-trap. Social myth. It’s the equivalent of asking “Would you prefer $5 in dollar bills or quarters?” in a world where things are expensive and change is easily acquirable for the rare situations that require it, and thinking the answer always directly relates to weather patterns.

If it was Susan Storm Richards version, I’d pick invisibility. Otherwise, flight. Flight is just more useful, even if you can make your clothes invisible and be invisible to the entire EM spectrum.

My favorite power set to pick up would be a Green Lantern ring. Power limited only by imagination and will coupled with a super computer with access to the complete records of the oldest and most anal ocd species in the universe. Imagine what you could learn from that.

Flight, without a doubt, as long as it came with wings and a tail to rudder.
Invisibility is just. . . eh. I mean, to be undetectable you’d have to be naked AND (insert word for “cannot be touched” here) AND undetectable by lasers and other things. In the place of the naked-dreams, I have dreams of falling sensations, falling backward. If I could fly, and knew how, then I probably wouldn’t have those dreams. Oh, and I’m a bit of both an intro- and extro- vert, in that if I know someone well I’ll talk to them more often than if I don’t know someone. Off-topic sentence is off-topic.
. . . But, then again, in my opinion the perfect being is a blue and red dragon. . .

I know this is way after the fact, but I’m going backward through the logs and thought it was worth a pause to discuss.

First off, a disclaimer: sixth year of university, in Engineering.

My first instinct, really, was invisibility. The work I enjoy doing, is not the kind that people see, but the kind that people use to *do* the jobs that people see. I was the lighting guy for our stage productions in high school, so the audience never acknowledged me unless I screwed up, but if I wasn’t there the show would not exist. In college I filmed things for people, or fixed computers, or built stuff that people needed, but always took a backseat while they went up front and used what I had made to do their public jobs. So my first instinct was invisibility, because it would make it easier for me to hide and do the essential background work that nobody sees.
Of course, I quickly dismissed this idea, for various concerns both practical and intangible.
In the first, I enjoy construction. This means heavy lifting and occasionally standing upon rather high, rather precarious locations. Assume the ability to fly brings only slightly more force than was required to cancel my weight, but the energy my body expends is much less than what is required for my muscles to lift my own weight. I could use the ability to negate most of my weight and make lifting work much easier (as, a 200lb man deadlifting a 200lb beam is lifting 400lb, where the same man, weighing only 5lbs, could lift 395lb of beam with the same effort, or the same 200lb beam with half the effort). Additionally, were I to slip while climbing rafters, I could decellerate myself during the fall so as to prevent injury.
Many folks here discussed the ability to fly at very high speeds or altitudes; without protection, this is impossible. The SR-71 Blackbird, flying near 100,000 feet where there is so little air you can see stars at noonday, still encouters enough friction at Mach 3.5 that the surface of the plane may reach temperatures of over 400 degrees. Were a person to attempt high-speed flight at lower altitudes (where there is enough oxygen to breathe; recall, Everest is only 27,000 feet above sea level and many die trying to summit it without supplemental O2), air is dense enough to shred a person’s flesh. The highest windspeed recorded in the US was I believe 319MPH, at the center of an F-5 tornado; that’s about as fast as a commercial airliner, but a human would be obliterated in those conditions. Flying at high altitudes, at low enough speeds that a person would not be destroyed by airborne objects (rain, hail, insects, sand) or even the wind itself, is dangerous due to the lack of oxygen and low air temperatures; additionally, there are problems associated with rapid decompression and recompression. The total change in air pressure from sea-level to space is about the same as 30 feet of water, so there isn’t much risk of “the bends”, but eardrums can easily be destroyed. So even assuming high-speed, high-altitude flight is somehow an attainable power, it is well beyond the ability of a human body to survive.
Considering invisibility as a potential power, a few complications of its own arise. Assuming invisibility results from a bending of light around the body, some light must be allowed to travel straight through to the eyes in order to see where one is going. This results in only partial invisibility; you could allow only some light to pass to the eyes, but then your vision would be quite dim. And as vision isn’t limited to a single line from the eyes but is a cone, and for that matter an ever-moving cone, the area of light-penetration must be variable. Along the same lines, if invisibility resulted from the body itself becoming invisible, the lens could not focus (as refraction is a boundary condition, and an invisible lens has no boundaries), and the retina could not absorb, so one would be completely blind; additionally, all foreign matter within the body (surgical implants, partially digested food, etc.) would likely not be invisible as well.
Were invisibility resulting from the bending of light, and communications were to be set up such that direction came from an outside source (perhaps through a radio link) and no direct vision of the outside was necessary, one would have to consider the effect of the bending field on the radio waves (as both radio and light are electromagnetic radiation, and both subject, to different extents depending on frequency, to the same refractive effects). Additionally, could one not see one’s surroundings without an external camera, the point of invisibility is defeated.

So from a practical standpoint, invisibility is all but useless as a power, except perhaps to hide in a stationary location where visual knowledge of the surroundings wasn’t important for the duration of your stay. Flight, as many would use it, is dangerous and would, without substantial protection, result in immediate death. However, used safely and appropriately, the power of flight could be harnessed to perform many practical flight- and nonflight-based tasks.
I know the note said not to overthink it, but I’m an engineer. Most of these considerations occurred to me within the first ten seconds of pondering the question.

Flight for sure. I see no real use in invisibility, because I have no need to hide my doings/I have no intention to do anything bad. BUT I have wanted to fly as long as I remember. I think Id find some kind of freedom in it, no need to be so close to other people, shortcuts…

And I don’t think that introvert/extrovert thing really works, because always before I have been considered an introvert. Even by a real psychologist. I have a slight problem with social situations…

Invisibility, so i can steal stuff, cos im scared of heights, and would NOT like flying, even though the NON-vicious vegetarian voices that HAVE NOT eaten my brain say that it’s not dangerous to drop from a large height.

I have already said my thoughts on flying in another comment (cold up there, avoid birds and airplanes, gov’t and FFA hassle). Invisibility would be awesome as long as you could still see yourself. I wouldn’t want to end up getting hurt just because I don’t know where my feet are.

i would NOT want to read minds. *Shudder* my first thought was flight which is odd bc i always figured id like invisiblity. but it depends. would flight mean i’d get wings? cause thats a serious wardrobe issue. would i be invisible ALL the time? cause that would suck. so on so forth. now TIME TRAVEL would be fun and very useful.